Best HBA controller for 18TB drives

[hallamnet]

Good afternoon all and hope you're all well. 

 

I am looking to start my unRaid journey (moving from Synology) and specing up the hardware I want to use and one of the main questions I have is: -  What HBA controller to use for an army of x12 18TB drives. Not going to be using 12 to start off with but want o get a HBA controller that is going to support this capacity drive. 

 

Case I have bought to house these drivers and my built is the following: - Link to case

 

 I have plenty of room for full height cards and ample cooling for cards like the LSI 9300-i16 that are known to run hot. 

 

I just want to make sure I am future proofed for large sized drives and will Probably stay Sata mechanical drives. I have been using WD reds in a Synology 1515+ now for around 7 years and have had a good experience with these drives but might possibly going for Seagate this time round. 

 

I will be using 2 NVME drives in a mirror for my OS drive on my mainboard and just use the mechanical drives for pure storage and docker VM's.

Mainboard and CPU still have to be confirmed but with the size of the case, I can get an ATX board in there so lots of options. 

 

But main question is: - What HBA controller will be best for my build that will be reliable and fit for purpose. 

Thanks all and looks forward to the replies. 

Hal

Edited June 2 by hallamnet

[trurl]

4 minutes ago, hallamnet said:

my OS drive

The Unraid OS is installed fresh at each boot, from archives on the boot flash drive, into RAM. The OS runs completely in RAM and none of the OS is installed to your storage. Think of it as firmware.

[hallamnet]

Fair play. I did not know this. As I say, still new to the custom NAS scene but just want to move from Synology and unRaid looks to me one of my best options. Still waiting for the case to arrive and will be testing the OS when this is all built before i migrate all of my data over.  

[_cjd_]

Nothing wrong with onboard SATA and a basic asm1166 based adapter card or so. I have 10 SATA devices including 5x 16tb on an m.2 1166 adapter (other 5 to onboard) and parity checks consistent with onboard SATA or lsi HBA speeds (22-24h depending on use during the day... Time machine doesn't care, I hate it for it's constant chatter). I've tried all 3 setups, this gets me the best power efficiency.

[hallamnet]

So I have dug out my old HP Microserver gen8 to give unRaid a bit of a 30 day trial test installing the OS (running from USB stick🫠) and do like the interface. Tonight, going to have a play with share permissions and VM's and docker containers. 

 

I know Sata connection will be good for unRaid but eventually having 12 drives, I want to keep it nice and neat inside the case and only having 3 data cables going from the controller to the back pane will be what I am going for rather than an army of Sata cables. 

 

Is there anyone on the forum that have experience in getting 18TB Seagate drives running on the LSI 9300-16i or above? I know the 9300 runs very hot and the 9305 runs cooler with only 1 control chip as opposed to 2 chips but with the cooling in the case, should not be an issue but if I can have a bit lower power consumption, that would be great. 

 

I have had a search online trying to find people with real world experience but not finding much in the 18 TB realm so if any one can point me in the right direction, thanks:) 

 

 

[JorgeB]

Any LSI 92xx or newer should not have any issues with 18TB or larger disks.